Chapter 7: The Geometry of Ideas

For the first time after one of his episodes, Rob saw a doctor. The UNNESA flight controller who had been on duty when the call came in insisted on it. He spent three days in the hospital giving samples of pretty much every fluid and solid available. He endured electroencephalograms, CAT scans and MRIs. He talked to therapists and counselors, doctors and medical researchers until he couldn't talk anymore, and nobody could find a thing wrong with him. Not everything was textbook normal, but nothing was off enough to be an indicator of any sort of problem. In the end the experts could only say that there was concrete evidence that Rob had experienced a period of intense mental activity and physical exhaustion. Ted and Wendy could have told them that, and did!

Rob was released in time for the Saturn flight, but wasn't sure if he should go. It was only the fact that every piece of equipment he would want was available either on the Hawking or the Cherenkov, and that the Cherenkov would be coming along, attached to an external docking hard point that let her be integrated into the Hawking's structure and included in her gravitic and drive fields that convinced him to go.

Twenty scientists signed up for this trip, from six different universities as well as the Chinese and U.S. Governments. Their fees alone were going to cover the costs for this trip. With Titan on the menu, they seemed heavily weighted towards the atmospheric and planetary sciences, but there were still some genuine mysteries to solve. There also was a neurologist on board, to keep an eye on Rob. The fourth berth on the Cherenkov was going to be his, and he was being paid to monitor Rob at all times when he was working.

Only Wendy and Ted knew what He was working on during the trip, not even Doctor Kepler, the neurologist knew. Rob was going to have plenty of time to work on it. The trip out was going to take half again as long as the Jupiter trip. Saturn was almost double the distance from Earth that Jupiter was, but once again they were gaining efficiency, and experience with their gravity engines. The Hawking had already seen a 75% improvement since the first trip to Mars.

One of the things Rob had to build for his research were modified gravitic field generators that allowed him to shape the flow and output of the standard G-drive. The Hawking was 4.5 au out, almost Jupiter distances when Rob told Wendy he needed to meet with the brains behind the power team. She grabbed Peter London and Saalih Jaffre, and he grabbed Victor Emanoff. This wasn't something you discussed without the Captain. Lunch was in the owners cabin, which was half again as large as any cabin on the ship, and the one concession to being 'the owner' that Rob had allowed. Considering how little time he spent in it these days, he might have seriously considered having it converted to another function if it wasn't already designed to be used as a conference room when needed. He had it set up for that purpose when everyone arrived. Lunch was laid out already, grilled sea bass and salad. Yummy!

Once everyone had a chance to make a dent in the lunch, Rob activated the holo-projector. The lights dimmed automatically.

"I have been working on my signal problem, as you all know. One of the things I needed to be able to do was focus and direct my signal sources." The projector was showing a 'blow-up' diagram of both the research reactor and the research drive on the Cherenkov.

"Modifying and directing the output of the reactor is a well understood process, and Wendy's latest energy couplers are proof that this is a well researched area." I dropped the reactor from the display, and centered on the G-drive. The standard issue drive, as first installed slowly rotated in everyone's view.

"In order to study this signal source, I made a few modifications to this drives outputs, putting new deflector fields around it, and then wrapped that entire system in a shell field that was designed to focus the output in a way that was more compatible with my inputs."

The image, done mostly in subtly glowing shades of blue and green, sprouted a violet shell, inside of which were embedded bright red curved fields, representing something Rob called 'deflector plates' The image slowly rotated, showing the drive now looking like an old style jet engine, with moving deflectors to focus the thrust. The view changed to the next image. The red plates suddenly tripled, covering the drive in multiple layers, and covering the drive more thoroughly.

"But it suddenly occurred to me that my deflector plates and tuning fields could be used in a different way."

"This can't be correct, can it?" Saalih said, looking at the diagram, and then reading the data that scrolled in the air below it.

"I believe it is. But of course even if it is correct, the problem is still the same as with out current drives, isn't it?"

"Inertial compensator efficiency." Peter said loudly.

"Exactly! Wendy said. "We've improved our compensator efficiencies, and that has let us double our existing drives to almost 6 percent of C. This new drive would appear to be able to do 80 to 95 percent of C if we can get the compensators to achieve the same kind of breakthrough."

"As usual, the compensators never seem to catch up as quickly, but here's a modification using the same deflector plate and tuning field technology." Rob said, flipping the display to the appropriate image.

"We need to test this. We could be in Saturn's orbit tomorrow if we had these modifications working." Victor declared.

"I agree. Ideas anyone?"

"How about your original SISI?" Wendy said. "Its sitting idle in the docking bay now that you have the Cherenkov to play with."

"My God!" Peter said, standing excitedly. "Do you realize that this opens the entire solar system up for almost casual travel? Days or weeks instead of months and years to get from any point in the system to any other!"

"I agree with both Wendy and Peter." Victor said. "The SISI is the perfect choice, and indeed, this promises to once again revolutionize travel within the solar system, just as completely as the Pai Lung did when we first took her to Mars."

"Alright, here's what the simulator says about the whole idea." Rob said, flipping the display at last to the feed from the unit on the Cherenkov where he'd done all the preliminary work.

A project to work on while quietly zooming through the void was always welcome, and everyone in the drive and systems crew threw themselves into it with gusto. No one was going to be so foolish as to test this new drive with a live crew. It would all be done with remotes.

The first step was to dump all the data into the Hawking's own modeler and simulator, and let the crew run the data themselves. With their specialized eye for things relevant, Rob's beginning idea was quickly modified, dropping power consumption levels down to more reasonable levels from the wasteful ones he had been projecting.

The biggest piece of re-engineering was the modifications to the secondary field generators that already existed on the standard drive, and the addition of a band of tertiary generators and the new tuning field generator. While those pieces were being built Howard Dexter and DeeDee Ponders began redoing the controls to allow for remote operations. The previous work done to tie the Hawking's slap and go panels into the Command Net finally got put to some real use, and that work made the tie-ins go pretty quickly. Once again the advantages of the bandwidth of the FHS connections made it possible to ensure that they were doing real-time remote controlling of the SISI.

The modifications to the inertial compensators were much more straight forward, but it was even more crucial that they work right once people started being put aboard, so that work got double and triple-checked, and then checked again. The interior of the SISI got peppered with tiny little gravitic telemetry sensors that would feed us real-time reports on the effectiveness of the compensators.

Dave Hamlin's tractor beam technology really proved itself when it was time to test the new drive. They locked onto the SISI through the opened transport bay and pulled her out and into position a hundred miles to port of the Hawking. The tractor was set to release its grip at the slightest sign that the SISI wanted to go faster or slower than her current velocity. The tricky part was configuring the tractor's gravity fields so that the SISI's drive wouldn't react against them.

The engine startup and drive engage process had been fully automated and put on a timer, to eliminate any interference from human sources. DeeDee was the voice of 'launch control', and most of the ship was tuned in via a sensor screen somewhere, watching and hoping for success. The external tractors were very definitely a bridge function, so everyone heard from the bridge first.

"Launch control, this is helmsman Krupt, your package is on station."

"Roger helmsman, this is launch control initiating startup sequence."

Rob was sitting with Wendy and Saalih watching the telemetry readouts, superimposed on the bottom half of a display that was also showing the SISI, via sensor array. When the board showed the warmup was complete, Saalih keyed his tap.

"Launch control, we have green lights across the board. Launch is a go."

"Roger that mission control. Initiating automatic drive start up and engagement procedure on my mark." DeeDee's voice came, and a few seconds later. "Mark."

They watched the telemetry as it showed the gravitic drive cycling up to power, and then a brief blink as it engaged. Suddenly the SISI was gone from the view screen. They all had to force themselves to look down at the telemetry readings. It was Wendy's turn to tap into the comm and make an announcement.

"Launch control, telemetry indicates we have drive activity and readings show full integrity and acceleration at .63 lights."

This announcement was answered by a large amount of cheering on the ship's public channel. Several seconds later, DeeDee came on again.

"This is Launch control, we read the SISI as having just passed beyond Jupiter orbit. She is currently accelerating at .82 lights and ETA to Saturn orbit is ninety minutes."

That was a wild-ass guess, based on speed only. They wouldn't know for sure how practical that estimate was until they got a handle on how the inertial compensators were doing. They started pouring over that set of telemetry data immediately.

Ten minutes later and victory hads turned into apparent defeat when all telemetry from the SISI suddenly went dead. DeeDee was the only even marginal voice of calm.

"We don't know for sure if its gone or not. It could have hit something that forced the shield generators to draw power too quickly. It may have shut down, it may be just a telemetry failure."

The effort was appreciated, but they were despondent. What bothered most was that, in their zeal to record every little iota of what happened inside the SISI, they had completely forgotten to consider recording anything external. If the ship had indeed pranged off a piece of debris, there was no way of knowing. It was back to the drawing board.

A week later they had built not one, but four replacements. The new units were referred collectively as the G2s and designated individually, A through D. Telemetric sensors were slapped all over the outside of them this time. The power capacity of their shield generators were double that of the SISI and the plan was to launch them in pairs, with each unit of the pair dedicating some of their sensors to watching the other. Slight modifications to the control program were made to allow for the pair to maintain their relative positions during flight, and then it was time again.

G2-A and G2-B were tractored out into position and cycled up through power up and the telemetry check very quickly, and after a minimal hold to check systems stability, the launch controller gave the word.

"We have automatic program initiation on my mark." Came the helmsman's voice. "Mark!"

Once again we watch the auto-sequence cycle up the drive and then the pair of G2 probes blinked and were gone.

"Launch control, telemetry indicates we have drive activity and readings show full integrity and acceleration at .61 lights." Wendy's voice came through the comm. There was no spontaneous cheering this time. Everyone held their breath and waited for the next words.

"This is Launch control, we read the packages as having just passed beyond Jupiter orbit. They are currently accelerating at .73 lights and ETA to Saturn orbit is ninety minutes."

This estimate was no more accurate than the previous one, but the telemetry held, and the next words came again from launch control.

"This is launch control, the packages are currently accelerating at .615 lights. ETA to Saturn orbit is 40 minutes.

Almost afraid to divert their attention to the telemetry, they began to dig into the data to see if the compensators had done their job.

"8.32147g max on A!" Howard Dexter called out.

"8.37139g max on B!" came DeeDee's voice immediately after.

This was not welcome news, but it wasn't unexpected. We knew the new compensators were good, but we didn't expect them to handle the new levels of acceleration. We would spend a good amount of time tweaking both the compensators and the internal governors on the drive controls to make sure we had safe speeds that didn't leave little red smears on the insides of the ships.

"This is launch control. Deceleration has been auto-initiated." Came the call from the helmsman some time later. Twenty minutes after that came the announcement that finally drew the cheers on the ShipNet.

"This is launch control. We have received the 'at station' signal. Telemetry indicated we have two birds parked in Saturnian orbit." This was victor's voice at the end, having preempted the helmsman for the announcement.

In the end, this new development didn't really save any time on the outward leg. Modifying a few drives that had been slapped onto a couple probes was one thing. Modifying the Hawking's drives while en route was another, not to mention there would have to be a serious amount of testing with the compensators and the new settings for the governors on the drive controls. Rob got the Cherenkov's drives and compensators adapted, and so did the Beagle and Viking, but they were not going to do the main drives until the Hawking was safely in orbit around Saturn. Testing was another matter that would have to wait until we were in orbit.

"At the new speeds, the transports are suddenly eligible for lifeboat duties again." Rob said to begin the staff meeting.

The Hawking was in orbit around Iapetus, and it had already revealed some strange news. It appeared that the mysterious equatorial ridge that had been detected during the Cassini flyby at the end of 2004 was the vestigial remains of the collision which had created it. Iapetus was the result of two nearly identical masses colliding while still forming. The ridge was the 'seam' between the two original bodies. The reasons for the light and dark regions were still a mystery, but the current theory was that the darker region was overlaid with a foreign material, probably due to internal cryovolcanism, perhaps triggered by a meteor impact of some kind.

The scientists who had paid for the trip, along with the full load of geeks who made up most of our crew were all over it. Rob though, was more interested in giving the G2 probes a thorough going over and starting to test the freshly modified drives on the Cherenkov. Meetings like this were just an annoying side issue he was forced to deal with as the owner.

"We'll just adjust their outfitting back to what we used for the Mars trip." Victor offered.

"Even that might be overkill." Peter London offered. "Once we've got this up and running smoothly, the transports are days away from home from almost anywhere in the system, not weeks or months. Days."

"We arrived in Saturn orbit pretty much right on schedule and the science types are fairly oblivious," Ike suggested. "so I think we should keep this under wraps until we're back on Earth and Rob can file the patents on these modifications and make himself even richer."

"Speaking of the scientists." Fred Wassermann said suddenly. "They're really starting to make noise about a Titan landing."

"We have to be careful with this one." Owen Gardner added. "There's real atmosphere on Titan. Its half again as dense as Earth's atmosphere, and there is the possibility of real weather there."

"We'll be safe in our Caldwell suits, won't we?" Keith Vance asked.

"We should be. The atmosphere may be thick, and the pressure higher than we're used to, but its over 98% Nitrogen. Methane makes up the bulk of the trace gases. We will definitely have to observe air lock procedures, and make sure we flood everything we plan on taking to the surface with nitrogen." Owen answered. "The methane is bad enough, but there are some trace elements that are very much instant rocket fuel when combined with oxygen. The same procedures will be necessary in the other direction because some of those traces include things like hydrogen cyanide, which is highly poisonous in even low concentrations. We don't want to bring anything back into our shirtsleeve environment."

So it went, the usual sharing of details, interests and concerns followed by the modifying of schedules and assigning of duties. Rob let the parts that needed sink in, and the rest wash past in a wave of disinterest. His head was already back aboard the Cherenkov, wrapped around his ongoing work.

Wendy and Ted were the only ones who might understand it, but the new drive which had everyone else so excited was mostly just a byproduct of the real idea he was pursuing.

Rob stayed home for a while, working on the G2 probes, modifying them further for his own uses. Now that he could 'see' the signal that identified a source of what he was calling the 'Q3 wave', it was time to try to reproduce it. He created two rotating gravity compression fields like those used to focus the gravity drives to their new speeds, and like the inner tuned fields of a Caldwell suit. He cranked up the power until each field approached singularity strength and then meshed the two fields, closer and closer together until finally the two fields hit a 'sweet'spot' of field harmonics, and bam! It was generating a Q3 Wave, just like the ones he'd been detecting. Rob had an artificial Q3 beacon!

Considering the implications of a beacon, Rob wondered about the possibility that there might be aliens out there in the universe somewhere using this same technology, and using it as he hoped to be able to, for interstellar travel, then his beacon was the equivalent of turning on the 'Open for business' sign.

A Q3 wave is one thing, but moving from that to generating a Q3 field, that was another story, and one that was going to take some serious tinkering!

The first thing Rob did was build a working 'quantum gyroscope'. This was a relatively old technology in a sense, based on the Josephson effect, first theorized in 1962, but the gyroscope itself came out of Berkeley at the turn of the century. The sensor array technology borrowed on these origins as well, but this time Rob was applying them to the new Q3 wave, which like so many things in the universe, exhibited two faces, wave and particle. He was using the particle side of things to make a Q3 pseudo-superfluid, and then spinning this up to match the rotating compressed gravity fields.

By the time they had their first accident on the surface of Titan, Rob had a theoretically workable Q3 drive built in the modeler, and no way yet to know if it was testable.

The accident was just a small 'flash blast', as Victor called it. A rock sample containing a small pocket of methylacetylene vented in an airlock that had just finished cycling back up to a normal interior Earth atmosphere. A slight static discharge caused the two gases to go boom! The small quantities involved produced only minor damage to the container the samples were in and the scientist involved was unharmed, thanks to the Caldwell suit. Safety procedures that had been taken only semi-seriously by the scientists up to then suddenly became the topic of conversation.

The presumably natural Q3 beacons Rob had been detecting since the trip to Mars could be anywhere in the universe. Signal strength in this case bore no relationship to distance, and he was now able to detect them so well that he was having to refine the circuitry to include filters and rectifiers to allow for isolating individual signals.

The nearest theoretical source of a natural beacon was the Sun, and after that, it would be Alpha Centauri. This was a particularly rich source as well. Alpha Centauri was actually a three star system, with Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Alpha Centauri C, which was the physically closest, and thus called Proxima Centauri.

Armed now with a discriminating detector, Rob needed to calibrate it, and the most obvious reference point to use was the Sun. In order to pinpoint which Q3 beacon was the Sun, He would have to triangulate the signal. This was operating under a large series of assumptions of course. First, that the stars themselves were the sources of most, if not all of the Q3 signals being detected. Rob would soon have some proof one way or the other. If he couldn't triangulate a source that matched the Sun's position, then Rob's theory collapsed, possibly completely.

With Wendy, Ted and Dr. Kepler along for the ride, the Cherenkov was once again loose from her piggyback position atop the Hawking, and with the new drive was quickly 'on station' a light hour north of the solar ecliptic. Here Rob took the first 'sighting' of the Sun with the Q3 detector. He isolated several dozen signals and classified them by strength, spin frequency, spin harmonics and a couple of other measurable factors. Then it was time to change positions. That meant it was time to tell Victor that the boss was going to be zipping off into the black yonder using the new and relatively untested drive!

"Victor, I'm doing some triangulation work, and need to move the Cherenkov. We are going to move multiple times to shoot the Sun with some equipment I've been working on." I told him over breakfast.

"Okay, how far off?" Victor asked.

"No more than 15 or 20 AU." I said.

"Holy! Rob that would put you on the opposite side of the Sun from us!" Victor said, spitting little flecks of omelet as he did.

"Well, we probably won't ever be quite that far away, but we're shooting the Sun with my detectors, so we will at least be at the other two points of an equilateral triangle. The Hawking would be the first point and the Sun would be the center."

While they shot the Sun, they also shot what it was hoped was Alpha Centauri A, and B. Rob needed to crunch the solar triangulation numbers first, and wanted to let the simulator make a few predictions based on his assumptions, but comparing the predicted results of the Sun shots with the after-the-fact reality of our readings would give a good sense of whether the direction his thoughts were heading in was likely to be a dead end or not. Not perfect, but a big help when your still in the 'chopping off hydra heads' stage of eliminating possibilities.

Alpha Centauri A was the perfect candidate for comparing to the Sun. The two were startlingly similar to each other in class. The relative nearness made it possible, but just barely, to triangulate from the same three points that had been used to shoot the Sun. Rob held that data in reserve for the moment and began to run his routines. Since they were back in the vicinity of the Hawking, everyone else's lives returned to more or less normal. Saturn-normal at least.

While they had been gone, the Hawking had finished its work on Titan and Rhea. Dione was the current target, but it was too similar to Rhea to generate much interest on its own. The one exception were a series of immense 'ice cliffs' first spotted by Cassini. They had proved to be as spectacular as imagined, and Peter London finally got some shots to rival his Jupiter Rising series. He had already gotten his best shots of Saturn and her rings from Iapetus. Her inclined orbit allowed for much better separation from orbital plane than the other moons, which shared the same plane as the rings. From the others, the rings were pretty much an edge-on view and not too dramatic.

The number crunching Rob was doing was seriously heavy duty, and the run had not completed before it was time to move on to Tethys. This moon was another Dione and Rhea. Tethys was almost a twin to Dione, as far as size went, with only 60 kilometers difference in their diameters. Dione was almost twice as heavy though. Tethys is mostly water ice, but still no more exciting to look at than the previous two moons. Most of the time there was spent in and around the Ithaca Chasma, a big fracture valley that was 2000 kilometers long and a hundred wide and as deep as 5 kilometers in some places.

One of the activities Rob took the time to indulge in as part of his 'medical mandate' to pursue non-work activities was to race Yuri Stepanovich down the length of the canyon. They staged a race between the Viking and Beagle, and with a couple of the G2 probes slaved to them to provide external points of view, shot high definition video of the race, including some nice passing and maneuvering shots. It was all a sort of homage to the old Star Wars movies and their 'pod races' and other high speed chase scenes. Once they had it 'in the can', they let Alexandra Nascimento add sound effects, which was something she liked to play with in her spare time, and fired two versions off through the Q-net to Earth. The original version was completely soundless, as it had to be with no atmosphere to conduct sound, and the second was Alexandra's version, with all the swooshing and humming of a Hollywood epic.

Once Rob had the solar numbers crunched, it was time to process the numbers from Alpha Centauri A. He ran a full dozen passes through the data, using several known reliable points of comparison and multiple redundancies. It meant the numbers were going to be a little fuzzier, but it eliminated the possibility of gross error. In the end he was really only looking for the answer to a yes or no question. Was this really Alpha Centauri A they were detecting?

While he ran those numbers, the crew of the Hawking buttoned up the research on Tethys and moved on to Enceladus. In addition to being far and away the most reflective object in the solar system, at least as far as visible light goes, Enceladus was another hotbed of cryovolcanic activity. The Cassini probe had actually spotted a plume from a cryovolcanic eruption as it was occurring. Speculation from astrobiologists on Earth since then had fueled a huge interest in it, and fully half our scientists were here specifically to do some up close and personal examination of Enceladus' watery interior. Chemical analysis of the Cassini data had long been thought to offer hints that Enceladus would be, if not the bearer of life, perhaps the rosetta stone that allowed scientists to gain an understanding of how life could originate. These same scientists had been gaga over the hydrocarbon and nitrogen rich atmosphere on Titan, which was another touchstone of the early Earth conditions that existed before the first living organisms existed.

Rob spent his 'free' time doing flybys of the E ring and using the transport's newly installed tractor beam to scoop up samples. A popular theory suggested the material for the E ring came from the cryovolcanic ejecta from Enceladus. Cassini had pretty much confirmed this long ago, but nothing beat having samples!

The numbers finished crunching two days before they were scheduled to move on to the Death Star. That was the joking nickname for Mimas, the innermost of Saturn's major moons, and the last stop. After Mimas, all they had on the list were some probes of Saturn itself, and some nice glamor shots of the rings.

The Saturn probes were a bit of a toss of the dice. The surface gravity was just over Earth normal, and the atmospheric pressure was almost half again as much as Earth's, but with surface winds possible in excess of a thousand miles per hour, no one was sure how long they could guarantee the survivability of anything sent down, gravitic shielding or not.

Rob was pretty much unaware of the Saturn probes, the Mimas results, the Enceladus disappointments or much else. His number crunching was complete, the modeler fired up, and the simulator humming, but he was slamming repeatedly into a hard wall of failure. Nothing he built with the modeler would produce results in the simulator. Unless of course your goal was spectacular explosions. Those he was able to produce in the simulator with ease. With frustration mounting, he finally broke down and let Wendy and the rest of the geeks in on the failures.

Rob ran the modeler data past them and then followed that with a half dozen of the most spectacular runs on the simulator in the Hawking's lab.

"There you have it." He said at the end. "There's some flaw in my theory that I'm missing, and until I do, I seem to be stuck simulating explosions instead of a new drive."

"Is this drive built out of the same nano-ceramic composites as our current drives?" Peter asked.

"Of course." Rob answered, what else?"

"Well there you go." Chester Magill said. "You don't have a theory problem, you have a materials problem."

"The standard composites aren't strong enough, or there is some other aspect that makes them unsuitable for this design?" Yuri asked.

"That would be my guess." Chester answered.

"I think Chester is right." Brian Conroy added. "Rerun your modeler to take the drive materials into account and see what you get."

With his blind spot squarely before him, Rob began to test for compositional and material parameters, and it quickly became apparent that the composites currently being used were inadequate to the task. The big problem was there was nothing better to use. The Nano-composites were the state of the art in material technology, and unless something else came along, he could well be at an impasse.

Rob spent the two weeks from that day until they returned to Earth orbit working on the problem and only reluctantly dragged himself away from it to play the returning explorer and 'mad genius' for the people of Earth. The new drive, and what it meant for interplanetary travel had people both cheering and booing, and most of them were at one end or the other of that spectrum.

He returned to a winter of discontent. Once again becoming the target of hate groups, mostly from the religious right, who felt their biblical beliefs were being slighted by his work. He didn't understand why. The work was no more relevant to biblical positions than was the invention of the television, but for some reason, Rob became a magnet for their attention, and a focus for their anger.

His McKesson security team managed to foil three attempted attacks on him, as well as one when his parents were with him. That decided it, and he moved to Infinity Station. That was fine at first, but then word came that someone with a bomb had been intercepted en route to the station on a tourist flight, and he decided he needed to find someplace he could live that wasn't reachable by public transportation.

QuanTangle Base on the moon became their official home. Securely tucked away on the dark side of the moon, and far from innocent bystanders, He lived with Wendy and their parents in quiet isolation, continuing his research.

That was what the public believed anyway, and they did indeed establish a moon base, and used it regularly.

In the meantime, Rob bought a twenty acre island off the coast of Grenada in the Caribbean, through a dummy corporation. He and Wendy moved his parents there with them immediately and began working on her parents to join them. It was a tough sell. They had very deep roots in Port Angeles, and so did Wendy.

The island's previous owner had spent considerable time and effort in renovating and adding on to the villa that had been there when he bought the island back in 2007, and all that had to be done was to add some amenities to take advantage of the modern communication and transportation options. The fusion reactor was upgraded, gravitic shark screens were added on the swimming beaches and they spent some time putting in some personal touches, mostly a little change in some of the furniture and art. Everything was done through third parties.

They were also building separate homes adjacent to theirs for both sets of parents. They still had to convince Tom and Erica, but Rob's Mom and Dad were enthusiastic about the move and sinking their teeth into the project with gusto. Old railroad men have something of a reputation for planning, and being devils of detail. Bert Young was not proving himself an exception to that rule, and at this rate, Rob would definitely be glad to defer to him when it came to supervising the construction work.

The main villa was, as most older building in the area, a single story. This was a concession to the power of the hurricane, but one of the modernization plans was to wrap all the buildings in gravitic 'hurricane shields' that would protect them during any truly harsh storm. The new home was going to get a second story and the existing building would be expanded even more.

In some ways it was being deceptive to include Rob in the discussion of decorating contributions. Wendy and Rob's mom did most of the decorating, and along with Bert, handled the additions. The closest Rob came to decorating was to bring Sheila in from Boston to look the place over and set up a third of the ground floor as office space. QuanTangle south, she began calling it. Sheila in turn brought in some architects with an understanding of modern building materials, and they began feeding ideas to everyone. Rob only saw them when it was final decision time, and sometimes not even then.

The first piece of construction was to build a hangar for Isaac. The official story was that this was going to be leased out as a corporate retreat to the McKesson Aerospace Engineering division that had become famous for hiring out orbital and lunar construction teams. After all, who wouldn't want to spend time on a beach in the Caribbean after working in space? Nobody would be surprised to see surface to orbit traffic coming from their little Sandy Isle. Their third party agents bought a couple of less conspicuous vehicles for daily use, and contracted with a 'service' to do most of the shopping.

Rob spent most of his time at the base on the moon where everyone thought he lived. He was building a nightmarish device, one that he prayed wouldn't go up in a flash of harsh, harsh energy. The simulated runs said it would work, but the building of it was the hard part.

Since there was no material he could use that was strong enough to handle the new drive, Rob had to find a way to make the existing material stronger. He used the only thing he knew of and coated every piece of it in its own gravitic shield. Easier said than done you say? Whoosh!!